Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America that was coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.
He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Available at Amazon. Also available at Barnes & Noble or other book stores.

Thomas Merton: The Only Known Photograph of God

An avowed rationalist, W.C. Fields was reading a Gideon Bible in a hotel room when his manager entered. "Bill," said the manager, "What the hell are you doing? I thought you were an atheist."
"Just looking for loopholes," said Fields. "Just looking for loopholes."

A Dance to the Secrets of Time and Motion: The Pendulum Wave

Notice that at first the swinging balls form a line, then fall out of sync, forming snakes, squiggles and spirals. Our brains are wired to predict everyday behavior. We need math to understand this. Yet the world blunders on, trusting what is comfortably predictable.

Bats & Echolocation: Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See

Fugue:
My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and
play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only
recognize myself as a symphony.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietCounter Fugue:
What I cannot build, I cannot understand.
—Richard Feynman, physicist. as quoted by Craig Venter & encoded as a watermark in DNA of the first ever synthetic organism.

Clouds & ClocksAll they have in common are the first three letters.
You can disassemble clocks. You can reduce them to their parts, then put them back together. You can't do that with clouds. Therein lies the difference between reductionism and emergent systems, as well as reductionism & the unnameable. It depends on your point of view.

More Is Different: EmergenceAs P.W. Anderson had it, here is a broken symmetry. A new level of understanding must be created before we can move on to the next level. You cannot be explained in terms of the particles which compose you.

You are here in the Milky Way Galaxy, 1 of about 100 billion in the visible universe. This is not science-fiction.

We are all conceived in close prison, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. . .
But we sleep all the way. From the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake.(John Donne, Sermons)

Foucault Pendulum

In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) demonstrated the Earth turning. At the Paris Pantheon, the pendulum revealed reality not as it seems. Human kind
cannot bear very much reality, said TS Eliot. People are comfortable in the way things seem. Some guests in 1851 thought the pendulum moved with Earth stationary. But gravity kept it moving in the same plane as Earth turned along with the building from which it hung. They felt none of it, just as we feel none of the following phenomena. Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.

7/20/15

Walter Freeman's Ice Pick Lobotomy on Howard Dully

This is a sad story, but one of self-redemption, so if you read the book you will find that Howard Dully was able to salvage something of the tragedy others made of his life. It is titled My Lobotomy. The title is simple, not pretentious, and the narrative is straightforward. Dully began life as a normal boy, bright, at a young age able to beat his father in chess. Then something happened to him. What happened to him was Walter Freeman.Back then there were no authorities to protect the boy from a terrible injustice inflicted on him--an "ice pick" lobotomy performed by Walter Freeman. (See Walter Freeman at this site.)

I

The background. Lou, Howard Dully's stepmother, did not like him. He felt unloved by her and resisted her domination. The conflict gave rise to his lobotomy. Read the book to find out how. One scene in his boyhood proves revealing. It went like this. His stepmother vacuumed hair from the floor after giving a haircut. Here is the exchange between Dully and his stepmother after she hit his head with the metal end of the cleaner hose:

"I flinched.

She said, 'Oh, did that hurt?'

I said no. I wouldn't admit anything hurt.

So she hit me again, but harder. This time I flinched again. She said, 'How about that? Did that hurt?'

I said no.

So she hit me again, real hard this time. I felt dizzy. She said, 'How about that? Did that hurt?'

I didn't answer. I figured if I said no again she'd hit me again. I thought she was going to knock me out."

II

The affect on his life after the lobotomy. It is implied as he introduces himself in the book: "My name is Howard Duffy, I'm a bus driver. I'm a husband, and a father, and a grandfather. I'm into doo-wop music, travel, and photography.

I'm also a survivor. In 1960, when I was twelve years old, I was given a transorbital, or "ice pick" lobotomy.

My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some 'tests.' It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.

The surgery damaged me in many ways. But it didn't 'fix ' me or turn me into a robot. So my family put me into an institution.

I spent the next four decades in and out of insane asylums, jails, and halfway houses. I knew I wasn't crazy but I knew something was wrong with me. . . . Was there something I had done and forgotten--so horrible that I deserved a lobotomy?"

III

He had no condition to justify a lobotomy. His stepmother had him clinically evaluated. All six psychiatrists who interviewed him declared him a normal boy. Four of the six said that the problem was with his stepmother.

Then his stepmother found Walter Freeman, not a licensed psychiatrist, who boldly stated that the boy was "a schizophrenic and unless something was done pretty promptly . . . the situation would be irreversible."

At this point, Freeman with his "ice pick" reminds me of a saying. "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." The boy had to be schizophrenic because the lobotomist had his cure-all.

So Howard Dully, at twelve years old, had ice picks poked into his brain and twirled around until Freeman felt he had damaged enough of the cortex. Nothing scientific about it--just when he felt he had damaged enough.

IV

After the operation, Howard Dully said, "I felt drunk, and not quite there." When asked how the lobotomy affected his life, he replied that he "didn't know what happened organically" to his brain, but he "had a terrible, disastrous life." He explained that it was "not because of the operation, but because of what happened after. I didn't learn how to live."

Had Freeman done the lobotomy when Dully was an adult, the man would have become a vegetable. That's how badly Freeman damaged Dully's brain, as revealed by a recent MRI. But at twelve, the boy's brain found ways to compensate for its horrible trauma.

spiritrambler(at)gmail.com

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. W.B.Yeats

I have had a dream, past the wit of
man to say what dream it was.A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iv, i.&nbsp
On John Van Druten's gravestone

Martians are discussing humans, after one of them has visited Earth:
"These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat. . . .They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat."
"So . . .what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal. Are you getting the picture?"
(From "They're Made out of Meat" by Terry Bisson. Of such a contention, Colin McGinn says we are not equipped to explain the experience of consciousness.)

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

God and the Devil are talking, looking down at the desert where one of God's chosen is having a sacred vision. "You see," says God.” Now you will be out of business because my child has realized the Truth."Not at all," says the Devil. "I will help him organize it."

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/
Is my destroyer./
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas

Time is the school in which we learn.

Time is the fire in which we burn.(Delmore Schwarz)

It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things. &nbsp Ernst Mach

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. Ernest HemingwayI can imagine Jack The Ripper also saying this. John